The Controller

by Matt Brolly

  14

  Adrenaline still pumped through Lynch as he pulled onto the interstate. Talking to Sally was a tricky proposition at the best of times. Their conversations always followed a pattern. They guided one another from the painful reality of their lives. If they mentioned Daniel they did so with love, with fond remembrance. Now he’d broken the unwritten rule. In the matter of a few seconds, he’d destroyed the years of rebuilding he’d gone through with his ex-wife. They were back to the start. He’d forced Sally back into a game she’d never wanted to be part of, and with that came the anguish of reliving everything which had come before.

  He zigzagged through the traffic, receiving a number of horn blasts as he showed total disregard for everyone else on the road. He pushed his foot harder on the accelerator, a force within guiding him onwards. He considered how easy it would be to keep going, to press his foot as far down as it could go, to close his eyes and let the car lead him to oblivion.

  The elongated sound of a trucker’s horn tore him from his reverie. Lynch slowed down, cursing himself for his melancholy and selfishness. This wasn’t about him. This was about Daniel and Sally. He was to blame and had no right to take the coward’s way out.

  He eased into the inside lane and considered his next move. He wanted to speak to Sandra Rose but couldn’t take the risk. Her field office was compromised and Rose would be under surveillance. He needed to follow up the lead given to him during Razinski’s dying words. He had meager research on Mallard but at least he had something to work towards and for the time being it would be best to do it alone.

  He pulled over at a diner and ordered lunch. He was only an hour from Hardwick where Razinski’s father and daughter had last been seen. He’d given his word to Razinski that he would help his father and daughter but that wasn't why he was heading to the trailer park. If he was to find Mallard, or whoever potentially held Daniel, then this was the natural next step. Though he would have to watch from a distance. Rose would have returned to her field office by now and the FBI would have begun scanning the area.

  Taking a seat at the edge of the counter, he ordered a burger and fries and drank greedily from a mug of black coffee. He examined the diner’s patrons suspicious of everyone from the young family huddled in one corner of the room, to the elderly gentleman four chairs down from him. Experience told him danger could come from anywhere.

  The burger was limp and bland, smothered in ripe mayonnaise and salty relish. He drank a second coffee to wash away the taste, the burner phone placed on the counter. Only Sandra Rose had the number - if she’d placed it to memory as he had hers. He stared at it a bit longer, willing her to call, before settling his bill and returning to the van.

  The burger growled in his stomach as he pulled the van back onto the highway and set off for Hardwick. Images from the compound played through his mind as he meandered through the interstate traffic and onto the back roads. Lynch had never experienced death on such a grand scale and in remembrance the scenes had a dream-like quality. In part, this was because he’d experienced them through the fog of a gas mask. Trapped with the sound of his own breathing, he’d moved through the smoke-filled arena like a character in a first-person shoot-out game. He’d stepped over the corpses of his former colleagues with a worrying dispassion. He’d convinced himself this was due to his professionalism, the need to survive, as well as reaction to the sheer absurdity of what had happened but this resolution faded each time he remembered.

  A jeep, polished red with oversized wheels, overtook him, blaring its horn. It was only then Lynch noticed how slow he was travelling. He was close now. Hardwick was a ten-acre site on the outskirts of Waco. The small town had a population of circa ten thousand according to the battered signpost welcoming Lynch to its city limits.

  Hardwick was a non-descript American small town. Lynch pulled over into an Esso garage to check his map, in time to see a cascade of black vehicles each with tinted windows, roll by the main road.

  Lynch shut his eyes and took in deep breaths. He hadn’t seen the personnel within but the convoy was clearly FBI and it would be too much of a coincidence if they were headed anywhere but Hardwick. Why now? They would already have a presence there from yesterday. Something must have happened?

  He purchased some water from the gas station pondering his next move. They’d want to question him, minimum, so turning up at the scene uninvited wasn’t the smartest move. He didn’t want to waste time being interrogated. His sole focus now was on finding Daniel and he couldn’t let anything get in his way. Back at the car, he drank from the cold bottle whilst studying the map. He needed to access the scene without being noticed and his finger trailed the most promising location.

  Twenty minutes later he stood on high ground gazing down at the unfolding scene below. Two canvas tents had been erected on the harsh asphalt ground. Yards from the tents ran two sets of train tracks. From his vantage point, the rusted metal of the tracks suggested they were disused. Weeds poked through the stone covering between each sleeper, some reaching over a meter high. Lynch scanned the area searching for a sign of an active train, his eyes following the tracks until they disappeared to the south behind a set of hills and to the east towards the horizon.

  The tents suggested that bodies had been discovered and with such a large FBI presence, Lynch presumed this meant the Railroad had reached Razinski’s father and daughter.

  Had it all been a ploy? Razinski had led him to this place but Lynch felt he was being played. Why had they gone to the trouble of taking Razinski’s father and his daughter, only to dispose of them a day later? Lynch watched the ERTU agents work the scene. In a matter of days, the Railroad had gone from obscure legend to staging the mass slaughter at the compound; and now this. If nothing else, it was a statement. Razinski had been seen as a threat and had been eliminated in the most extreme way. Who now would dare to cross them?

  Lynch retrieved a pair of military-grade binoculars from his rucksack and zoomed in on the railroad lines. The significance couldn’t have been any clearer. Turning back to the agents, he spotted a lone figure standing motionless in the hive of activity surrounding her. She was staring out at his location. He zoomed in closer onto the figure, until he was able to see the smudged outline of the freckles decorating her pale face.

  Sandra Rose gazed back at him as if they were only meters apart, as if she knew she was being watched. She blinked, her nostrils opening as she took a breath. Lynch reached for the burner phone in his pocket as Rose drew the back of her hand across her cheek and turned away.

  15

  Rose agreed to work on the case with one caveat, that her partner Dylan Stillman wasn’t allowed any part in the process. Following his deception at her safe house, she wasn’t sure she would be able to work with him again. For now, she’d been assigned the role of task force coordinator working alongside Special Agent McBride.

  McBride, resplendent in sunglasses, stood next to her, silent as they gazed upon the corpse of John Razinski, Gregor’s father. Rose had read his file on the way over, all single page of it. Razinski senior had existed beyond the parameters of real life. He’d never paid a cent of tax in his seventy-two years on earth, had no medical insurance or voting record. The only official record they had for him was as the owner of a fixed trailer on the outskirts of Hardwick.

  Not that his body had been discovered there. Unlike the rest of Razinski’s family who had been slaughtered where they lay the previous night, Razinski senior and his eight-year-old granddaughter had been taken from their residence to the railroad line which split the backwater town in two. All evidence suggested that it was by the tracks that the pair of them were executed. Two bullets for each. One to the heart, one to the brain.

  Rose stared at Razinski senior dispassionately, her mind pondering the cliché of the apple rarely falling from the tree. She’d already convicted Razinski senior, imagining an upbringing of abuse for his monstrous son. Hopefully the granddaughter had escaped the worst of it for
her brief time on earth.

  Both bodies had been left in plain sight next to disused railroad tracks.

  ‘It’s obviously a signal. They wanted the bodies discovered,’ said McBride, breaking the silence. The agent had a lilt of an accent to his speaking voice that Rose couldn’t yet place.

  ‘They’re reminding us of their power.’

  ‘Hardly needed following what happened at the compound.’

  Rose turned away from the bodies. ‘Maybe it’s not us they’re signaling to.’

  ‘It sure as shit isn’t the Razinskis. They’ve wiped out the whole clan in one fell swoop. Three generations.’

  They were at an impasse. Over forty dead agents, and now the Razinski family, with no indicator of who was responsible save for a vague link to an organization that possibly didn’t exist. Rose’s hand reached for the burner phone in her pocket, her memory returning to last night with Lynch. She recalled his hesitancy with a secret smile and wondered again why she’d let him leave. ‘We need to start looking at the Gunn family. It all started with them. I also need the Rota at the compound for the last six months including all prisoners and interrogations. Could you access that information, McBride?’

  ‘You’ll have it within the hour.’ McBride stared at her through the protection of his shades before leaving her where she stood.

  Rose left Razinski senior to the ERTU and walked towards the tracks. Despite their reason for being there, an air of calm hung over the place. The tracks ran through a narrow valley. She bent down and ran her fingers across the cold hard metal, imaging the trains that had passed through this very spot over the years supported by the lumps of metal under her flesh, the twin ribbons of steel which stretched for thousands of miles across the country.

  Rose understood the lure of the railroad. Like the open road, it was romanticized. At one time, the railroad would have been the main source of income and employment for the small town of Hardwick. It would have supported hundreds of similar communities nationwide and there was something melancholy about viewing this empty and defunct stretch of line still trailing the countryside, a living memorial to the glory of the past.

  She pushed herself up, feeling a slight pull in her calf muscles and thought again about Lynch. She wanted to call him but couldn’t use a burner phone in view of everyone. She stopped and gazed out at the surrounding hillside, wondering if whoever was responsible was watching them, savoring their handiwork, before returning to the extended trailer van they were using as a mobile incident room.

  McBride had already compiled a file for her. ‘These are the logs for the compound for the last six months,’ he said. ‘Some of it is blanked out for clearance issues but we can always go to Miller if we need to.’

  Rose nodded. ‘Do you have anything else for me?’

  ‘We’ve been looking into CCTV coverage for this area. Nothing within a two-mile radius of this spot and nothing in the homes of the rest of the Razinski family. The best Intel we’ve uncovered so far has come from a neighbor of Lyndsey McIntosh, a distant cousin of Razinski, who spotted two dark vans on the night of the attack. We’re tracing plates of similar vehicles who have entered the town in the forty-eight hours preceding the attack up until present. However,’ McBride flicked his laptop around and pointed to the screen showing a map of the area punctuated by a number of yellow pin marks. ‘As you can see it’s possible to enter and exit both the town and the area where Razinski senior and his granddaughter lived without detection. This whole place needs a security kick.’

  Rose sighed. Security cameras were unlikely to be of great concern to the town’s chiefs. She’d seen too many places like this over the years, a forgotten America riddled with unemployment and poverty. ‘Let’s keep going. Coordinate with the team investigating the Gunn murders and report to me tomorrow morning. I’ve got a little light reading to do,’ she said, waving the file he’d given her and leaving the van.

  She’d decided to use a hotel for the night as it was a three-hour drive home and she would have to be back at the site in the morning. It was dusk by the time she reached the lobby. The significance of the case and her role within it was starting to become apparent. To lead such a case was an honor and potentially career changing though not necessarily in a positive way. Rose collected the key from the receptionist, a beaming woman smothered in make-up, and made her way to the room.

  The isolation of another non-descript hotel room was nothing new. After showering she lay on her bed in her robe, taking comfort from the familiarity of the box room and the patterns and order of living on the go.

  The file made for dense reading and it took some time to make sense of the various reports. All personnel were from the Bureau. The only people to have visited the compound in the last six months still unaccounted for were Balfour and Lynch. If the Railroad existed, it was conceivable they had a number of insiders within the Bureau and that one of them had either been present at the compound, or had access to the daily routine there. With Balfour missing, he had to be considered as the potential link

  Her eyes blurring, Rose shut the file and called room service. Her eating had been so piecemeal since the Gunn murders it was a wonder she had any energy at all. She ordered burger and fries from the less than inspired menu, before calling her sister on her cell phone.

  Abigail Rose was her only sibling. She was currently at law school at the University of Texas in Austin, following the same route Rose had taken, albeit with different aspirations. Technically she was Sandra’s half sister. They had different fathers, neither of whom were on the scene.

  ‘Sis,’ said Abigail, causing Rose’s face to break into a smile for the first time that day. Abigail’s voice was a melodic soprano. ‘I was going to call you later, actually,’ she said, in her sing-along fashion.

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Really. Guess who’s secured an internship with Judge Felicity Harris?’

  ‘Your roommate? Rachel isn’t it?’

  ‘How was I so fortunate to get such a witty sister?’

  ‘Congrats, Abi, that really is wonderful news. You deserve it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Abigail, oblivious to her lack of modesty. ‘I was thinking of going to see Mum this weekend to share news, if you’re free?’

  Rose noticed the change in her sister’s cadence, the elongation towards the end of the sentence, the deepening of her tone. ‘Not this weekend, Abi. I’m on one hell of a case at the moment.’

  ‘When aren’t you?’

  Rose sucked in her breath, ignoring the coldness in the rhetorical question. ‘It’s such great news though, Abi. There’ll be no stopping you now.’

  Her sister didn’t respond. She pictured her gripping the phone, internally debating whether to start an argument or not. ‘When was the last time you saw her, Sandra?’

  Rose sighed. ‘Abi, now’s not the time. Let’s not spoil this good news with a fight.’

  ‘I’m not fighting, Sandra, I just wish you’d speak to me.’

  Rose inhaled again, the walls of the room appearing to encroach on her space. Her mother lived in a care home in Austin, near to where Abi studied. She’d been diagnosed with dementia five years previous and it had been a few months since Sandra had last visited. Although the guilt ate away at her like a parasite, she couldn’t bring herself to visit on a more regular basis. The last time she’d been there her Mother hadn’t recognized her. It had happened before but on this visit there’d been a blankness to her Mother’s eyes she’d never encountered before. It was like looking at a different person, as if history had been rewritten and all her childhood memories of her mother had been deleted from it.

  ‘I’m not exaggerating about the case, Abi. It’s a big one. I couldn’t get away…’

  ‘Even if you wanted to,’ said Abigail, interrupting.

  ‘I’m going now, Abigail. It really is great news about your internship. Talk soon.’ She hung up before her sister had time to continue the argument.

  Room service
arrived and she ate on the veranda. The burger was better than anticipated, thick and well seasoned. She pictured Abigail back in her shared apartment, full of rage and resentment. She was right to want more from her and Rose was thankful her mother still had Abi to look after her. She was failing both as a daughter and a sister but the thought of seeing her mother now filled her with a dread she was unprepared to face.

  After mopping the remaining ketchup from her plate with her last cold French fry, she returned to McBride’s file of the compound staff. It was like reading a litany of death. So many good people, so many families ruined forever. She read the names of Balfour’s guards, the ones who’d effectively saved her and Lynch’s life by guiding them to the gas masks. She discovered the names of the other fallen bodies, the agents who’d surrounded Razinski’s prison, the guard from the outer perimeter, the woman she’d chatted to whilst waiting to speak to Lynch for the first time. All gone, extinguished from the world in less than a few minutes and she would have been one of their number had blind luck not intervened.

  She read page after page, noting the names of those who’d been as fortunate as her by either having left the rotation or by being off shift.

  A knock on the door jolted her as she was reading an entry with potential. She hadn’t called room service again so edged her way back into the room and retrieved her firearm. Standing to the edge of the door she called out. ‘Who is it?’

  She relaxed on hearing the reply though her pulse was still in overdrive.

  ‘Rose, let me in. It’s Lynch.’

  16

  Lynch had followed Rose back to the hotel. He’d waited in the van for the last two hours giving her time to eat and unwind, parking beneath the low-hanging trees to the rear of the car park where he could access the coming and goings through the entrance of the hotel.