The Controller

by Matt Brolly

  He didn’t want to disappoint the woman but he didn’t want anything she was offering. ‘Sorry, not thirsty.’

  The woman smiled but held her ground as if not fully understanding what he was saying. ‘Please,’ she said, her face still formed into a perfect smile. Her beauty was hard to look at, harder still considering why she was there. Lynch turned his mind back to the hundreds of cases he’d studied in the past, the children young and old who’d disappeared near the railroad lines. Was she one of them? Was Daniel suffering a similar fate somewhere aboard this train? The last thought shook any compassion from him. ‘No,’ he shouted.

  The woman moved aside as the obese Ranger barged past her. ‘There is an easy way to take the drink. And there is a much harder way. Now drink up.’

  The woman tipped the bottle towards his lips. Lynch let the liquid fall into his mouth before turning and spitting it into the face of the obese Ranger. The man groaned and from behind him, Lynch felt the heavy blow of something hard on the back of his head. The impact caused his eyes to blur and the last thing he saw before slipping out of consciousness was the grinning face of the obese Ranger - contorted in his blurred vision to something monstrous -smiling before aiming his fist towards him at alarming speed.

  34

  Rose was back at headquarters in San Antonio when her phone beeped. It was the burner phone she used to communicate with Lynch and she’d forgotten to put it on silent. It vibrated in her pants pocket, the chiming sound echoing in the emptiness of the incident room.

  Yesterday’s visit to Dallas had been a burn out and McBride had been sulking with her ever since. No one wanted to discuss Balfour with them. Rose’s theory that Balfour’s former colleagues were more likely to talk to them face to face had been misjudged. The incident at the compound was not the secret that she’d imagined, and neither was Balfour’s disappearance. No one would talk to them in case they incriminated themselves. McBride had pointed out that it was something they could have discovered without the inconvenience of travelling halfway across the state but had said very little to her since.

  The small screen displayed two messages and she recognized the number as Lynch’s burner phone, the one she’d planted with a tracker chip. She’d been following his progress on her tracking app since that morning, soon discovering that he was either on, or closely tracking the seven am train from San Antonio to Chicago.

  She clicked on the message icon on the burner phone. If she was surprised by the first message, she was stunned by the second. Checking her smartphone, she confirmed that Lynch’s estimated location matched the location on his tracking device. The first message had given her little other information other than he’d taken a train to St Louis. The tracker showed he was still in East Texas between Marshall and Texarkana.

  The second message was rushed. It read:

  They are going to take me. Razinski said to me, Mallard

  Even for Lynch that took some beating. Being taken by the Railroad on a train. The tracking device was stationary and she feared he’d destroyed the phone and her only way of tracking him. She called the phone, unsurprised that it went straight to voicemail. If someone had come for him, then Lynch would have jettisoned it. She ran her hand through her hair, as a thousand thoughts rushed her, when her tracking device beeped again. Lynch’s second tracking device, the one she’d given him at the hotel, had just been activated. The beeping signal matched the other tracking device.

  McBride was sitting at a table in the office, his back to her. Rose placed the burner phone on the table next to McBride’s sunglasses and called his name.

  ‘Have I just woken in the nineties?’ asked McBride, staring at the chunky cell phone.

  ‘It keeps me in contact with Lynch,’ said Rose, sitting down next to him.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Take a look at the messages.’

  ‘Look, if you’ve got something going on with this guy just leave me out of it.’

  ‘Just look at them, McBride.’

  McBride feigned a look of hurt surprise before picking up the phone. Puffing out his cheeks, he said, ‘We know he caught a train.’

  ‘Look at the second message’

  McBride was unfazed by the next message. ‘How would they ‘take him’ if he was on the train? Doesn’t that trip take a number of hours?’

  ‘The train is due in Texarkana in forty minutes. It’s not supposed to stop at his current location.’

  ‘You think they’re taking him from the train?’

  Rose didn’t know anything at that moment, her mind was working overtime trying to work out what the hell was going on. ‘You come across anyone called Mallard?’ she asked.

  McBride shook his head.

  Mallard could be FBI or be protected somehow by someone within the Bureau. They needed to access Lynch’s files.

  ‘What did that message mean?’ asked McBride.

  Rose came clean. ‘Lynch spoke to Razinski before we left the compound. Razinski said something to him which he refused to share.’

  ‘Mallard?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  McBride rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘So Lynch has been conducting a one man search for this Mallard all this time.’

  ‘He must have been in danger to have shared that by text.’

  ‘He must have been desperate to have listened to a degenerate like Razinski.’

  ‘Lynch isn’t stupid, McBride. He wouldn’t have believed him without good reason.’

  ‘He may not be stupid but he’s deluded, or at least blinkered. He would believe anything if he thought it would bring back his son.’

  Rose’s pulse quickened. She felt compelled to defend Lynch even though McBride’s words were fair. ‘Remember that Lynch was the first to investigate the Railroad when no one even believed in their existence. Maybe if we’d listened to him then we wouldn’t be in this situation now.’

  McBride shook his head, wincing as he drank his coffee. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘We obviously need to find out who Mallard is and we need someone to meet that train,’ she said, trying to find the timetable online. ‘It gets into St Louis tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That gives us a bit more time, I guess. I’ll call the St Louis field office now.’

  ‘I need to be there,’ said Rose.

  ‘Not another road trip, Rose. Yesterday killed me.’

  ‘I’ll fly there.’

  McBride contemplated his coffee before replying. He sat awkwardly as if his neck was stiff. ‘You’re going to need to tell Miller and Roberts about the current situation. You might be able to use one of the helicopters.’

  ‘I guess they’d find that out soon enough anyway.’

  ‘Maybe so, but I don’t want to be the one telling them.’

  ‘My hero.’

  McBride grinned but didn’t respond.

  In the early hours, Rose took off in a Bell 407 helicopter from the rooftop of the San Antonio field office. Miller had reluctantly agreed with the caveat that Lynch had to be taken in for questioning once the train arrived.

  After checking with the rail authorities, Rose discovered that his train had remained stationary for less than half an hour, yet both tracking devices showed that Lynch hadn’t moved in the hours since he’d sent his text; the devices had either failed or been destroyed, but Rose still checked her app every few minutes.

  She’d left McBride at headquarters, searching Lynch’s files for a mention of Mallard. She used the journey to update her case notes, strategically omitting certain aspects of Lynch’s personal investigation. It was only days since the attack at the compound, but it felt like a lifetime ago. Her memory of the incident was tempered by the video footage she’d viewed and the subsequent development, in particular the photos of Lynch’s son.

  Since joining the Bureau, the thought of having children had hardly occurred to her. She’d had a couple of semi-serious relationships in that time but hadn’t met anyone she’d consider sharing a life with. To m
any, her sister in particular, this was an admission of failure, but Rose was content with her life. Dating an FBI agent was a novelty for most men; a novelty that soon wore off once they understood the full extent of her work and her tunnel-vision approach to it. Rose had never settled for second best in her work, and certainly wouldn’t do so in a partner, but she didn’t need to have had a child to understand what Lynch was going through. She had a niece and nephew via Abigail, whom she loved as unconditionally as any parent.

  ‘Yes, but you can hand them back,’ Abigail would say to her, not meaning to be cruel.

  She’d seen Lynch’s determination a number of times during cases. Parents were always the last to give in, to accept the inevitable. She’d dealt with enough missing children cases, had seen first hand the devastation of not knowing, of forever wondering what had happened to a loved one.

  A team were waiting for her at the St Louis field office. They rushed her to the back of a car, her companion an impossibly young blonde woman who introduced herself as Agent Madeline Gray. ‘We have a team ready at the train station,’ said the woman, as the car meandered through the St Louis traffic.

  They reached the station with five minutes to spare. A small SWAT team surrounded the platform where Lynch was due to arrive. ‘Slight overkill,’ said Rose.

  Gray shrugged her shoulders. ‘Orders from your SAC.’

  ‘Figures.’

  As the train pulled into the platform, the SWAT team made their way onto the platform. ‘That’s one way to put the frighteners on the passengers,’ said Rose, as she followed.

  The train stopped, and SWAT team members boarded the train. Rose followed Gray onto the first carriage, and informed all the passengers to stay in their seats. She made her way down the corridors through business class, to the cramped carriages of standard, all the time expecting to see Lynch.

  ‘He’d reserved a private cabin,’ said Gray, joining her. She was accompanied by one of the train’s crew, a tall woman in a smart grey dress.

  Rose showed the woman a picture of Lynch. ‘Did this man board the train?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, Mr Lynch. He was the one who was…’

  ‘Who was what?’ said Rose, to the agitated crew member.

  ‘Who was taken,’ said the woman, lowering her voice as if it was a secret.

  Rose blinked at the woman, speechless, as one of the SWAT team approached her.

  ‘Ma’am, I think you should talk to this gentleman,’ he said, pointing to a passenger sitting in the viewing compartment. The man was wearing denim jeans and a black t-shirt, his face decorated with a goatee beard. ‘Says he saw Lynch,’ said the SWAT member, standing aside to allow her to sit.

  ‘You saw this man?’ said Rose, showing the man a picture of Lynch after introducing herself.

  ‘Yes, he was sitting down there,’ said the man, pointing to the far end of the carriage.

  ‘When did he get on?’

  ‘He was already on the train when I got on at Austin.’

  ‘So where is he now?’

  ‘They took him.’

  ‘Who took him, sir?’

  ‘I thought you’d know. The Rangers took him when we stopped.’

  35

  The black t-shirt man’s name was Preston Bullard, a tech consultant visiting one of his clients in St Louis. Rose instructed the SWAT team to evacuate the carriage so she was alone with the man.

  ‘Why did you take the train? Wouldn’t it have been easier to fly?’ she asked the goatee-bearded man who was inexplicably relaxed considering recent events.

  ‘I like trains,’ said Bullard. ‘I have my own bed and I spend a big part of the journey working and I can bill hours for that.’

  Rose stared at him.

  The man smiled. ‘You got me. I’m scared to fly.’

  ‘So, tell me again, what happened when the train stopped?’

  ‘As I said, the Rangers came on board the train. They asked for all foreign citizens to make their way down to the canteen carriage. I’d seen it happen before so it wasn’t a shock to me.’

  ‘Did anyone from this carriage leave?’

  ‘Yeah, there was some girl. She looked like a backpacker.’

  ‘So this girl left the carriage and then came back?’

  ‘Yep. She must have had all her documentation up to date,’ said Bullard, who appeared to be enjoying the interrogation.

  ‘And this man? The man you said the Rangers took.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t paying much attention but I did notice he must have left the carriage at some point as his seat was empty for some time.’

  Rose nodded, not answering, prompting the man to speak further.

  ‘To be honest, I just got on with my work. But I noticed about five minutes after the train stopped that the man returned to his seat over there.’

  ‘Did he look shaken in anyway?’

  ‘Honestly, I didn’t pay him that much attention. But he looked fine to me.’

  ‘Which seat did he sit at?’

  ‘That far one by the door,’ said Bullard, pointing.

  ‘So, tell me what happened when the Rangers returned to your carriage.’

  ‘There were two of them. One was quite heavy set. I noticed they were both carrying guns. That always spooks me. Initially, they walked up to the seat three tables down.’ Bullard pointed to the other end of the train. ‘They stopped there and conferred. I had my earphones on. I turned down the volume to try and hear but they were whispering. It was as if they expected someone to be in those seats.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘The younger guy, who was much slimmer, spotted your man in the seat and pointed to him.’

  ‘And did ‘my man’ do anything?’

  ‘It all got a bit dramatic if I’m to be honest. The two Rangers ran down the carriage and they arrested the guy.’

  ‘And did he put up a fight?’

  ‘Not that I was aware of. Before I knew it they’d handcuffed him and were leading him out.’

  ‘Did you see where they took him?’

  ‘No, I stayed in my seat. I’m sure if you asked some of the others in the carriage they’d tell you. They were glued to the window like children at the zoo but I’d lost interest. I imagine they put him on the second train.’

  Rose stopped. She stared at the man who’d somehow forgotten to mention this new piece of evidence.

  ‘Second train?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I presume that’s where the Rangers had come from. After we stopped, this second train pulled up. It was quite intriguing actually.’

  ‘Intriguing?’ asked Rose, shaking her head, incredulous that the man had forgotten to mention the arrival of this second train.

  ‘Yes. Do you guys have your own private trains?’

  ‘What?’ said Rose.

  ‘Well, I’ve never seen anything like it before and I take the train all the time. The carriages were a different shape and size to your normal run of the mill Amtrak services.’

  ‘In what way?’

  The man played with a wedding ring on his left hand, moving it up and down on his finger.

  ‘Well, it was sort of futuristic, if you know what I mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Rose.

  ‘The carriages were like pieces of art. They didn’t have any edges. They were beautifully crafted; chrome, with large blacked out windows.’

  ‘Did you notice any insignia on them?’

  The man slipped his wedding ring back on.

  ‘No, as I said, I didn’t pay much attention but if you ask some of the others, I’m sure they’d be able to tell you something.’

  The stewardess and the other passengers on the train verified the story. Rose detained Bullard until his background had been fully checked. Next she spoke to the train’s engineer, Will Koeman. Koeman verified the story about the Rangers and the mystery train. ‘I got the call from the NOC twenty minutes before we stopped,’ he said.

  ‘NOC?’

&nb
sp; ‘National Operation Centre.’

  ‘Anything unusual in that?’

  Koeman pursed his lips. ‘It happens. Not for some time though. With the commuter trains it’s not such an issue. If I was hauling freight it would be a different matter. It would take an age to get the thing up and running again.’

  ‘This other train. You ever see anything like that?’

  ‘It was a new one on me. One thing struck me as odd was the lack of an engine number. Maybe it was hidden beneath all that shiny chrome. The NOC will have all the details.’

  Rose thanked the engineer before making some calls concerning this mysterious second train. She was surprised to discover that it was possible to use private trains on the railroad system, though her initial set of calls to the NOC had yet to resolve what this particular train was and who, or what organization, it belonged to.

  She left the details of that to Gray and called McBride. She told him about the Rangers and Lynch, and shook her head as he began laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny, McBride?’

  ‘It just gets better and better. So we’re now on the lookout for some sort of ghost train,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not a ghost train. Apparently these private vehicles exist. It’s a different world, I tell you. How is the research going on Mallard?’

  ‘I may have something positive for you there. Although it sounds as far fetched as this ghost train of yours.’

  ‘Just tell me, McBride.’

  ‘There’s not that much in Lynch’s notes, but there is mention of some hot-shot socialite who goes by the name Wilberforce Mallard. Wilberforce Mallard the Sixth, believe it or not; ex-trust fund baby, now in his fifties. Extremely wealthy, and I mean extremely. Trouble is he stays out of the public eye. He’s fifty-two but the last official picture of him on record is of him as a thirty-one year old.’