by Tom Clancy
Here, in this place, acceptance was inescapable, and that was also largely what had steered her along past home, the kids, and the chance to get some much needed sleep. And there was one final motivation for this self-guided tour of Hell, one last thing she'd needed to contemplate in absolute solitude ... one last thing, while she'd known she would be willing and able to lay herself open to the worst of possibilities.
Amid all the noise pollution that had bombarded her throughout the day, all the half-baked theories she'd heard and tried to deflect, all the craziness, there had been a single burr of speculation that had attached itself to her thoughts and defied her persistent attempts to brush it off. It had first been put to her by the sharper-than-he-seemed Gary Honey Vanilla near the end of their interview.
"... given the nearly simultaneous timing of the two incidents, and knowing that Orion's primary cargo was a lab element of ISS, has a connection between what happened in Brazil and the shuttle blaze been considered?"
Not by her, not until that moment. But she had been considering it on one level or another ever since.
What if there were proven to be a link between Orion and Brazil?
What if someone had intentionally caused the disaster?
What if Jim Rowland had not perished because of some accidental failure of construction or technology, but a willful, murderous act of destruction by someone who wanted badly enough to keep the launch from taking place?
She stood there in the mortuary silence of the bay, her hands laced behind her back, the crescent-shaped lines around her mouth deepening and deepening as these questions proceeded along their dark, ceaseless orbit through her mind.
What if?
THIRTEEN
SOUTHEASTERN BRAZIL
APRIL 21, 2001
IN THE MONTHS AFTER THE CATASTROPHIC DERAILMENT of the Sao Paulo--Rio de Janeiro night train that left 194 passengers dead or seriously injured, there would be many separate investigations with respect to its surrounding conditions and circumstances. To no one's particular surprise, their findings proved contradictory and disputatious, and led to a prolonged blizzard of litigation. The railroad line and its insurers would blame the company from which it leased the track, citing as factors a plethora of signaling, switching, and maintenance problems. The track owner and its insurers would point their fingers right back at the rail line, alleging a laxity of safety precautions overall, and specifically accusing the engineer, Julio Salles, of job dereliction. Attorneys for the victims and victims' families would side with the track owner following a computer analysis by accident-reconstruction experts who were hired in support of their class action lawsuit.
Upon Salles's suspension without pay pending settlement of the various torts, his personal lawyers argued that he was being scapegoated by the rail line and the track owner for their own negligence, while also dragging the corporation that had designed the train's new electro-pneumatic braking system and Doppler speedometer into the legal cross fire with claims that both systems had malfunctioned in the moments preceding the wreck.
The Brazilian government commission charged with reviewing the incident would take eighteen months and three thousand pages to tamely state their opinion that the facts were inconclusive and endorse an arbitrated agreement between the host of plaintiffs and defendants. With issuance of this white paper report as impetus, deals were cut between nearly all the opposing camps--the sole holdout being Julio Salles, who remained adamant that he was without culpability and insisted his reputation had been irreparably sullied by the allegations leveled against him. Yielding to advice from counsel, he eventually accepted an offer of retirement with full pension and back pay in exchange for a halt to court proceedings and public contention, but would privately continue to feel embittered toward the company to which he had given thirty years of his life, and sink into a deep depression.
Two years to the day after the disaster, Salles would mark that tragic anniversary with a lethal, self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head in the one-bedroom Sao Paulo flat he shared with his wife, making him in a very real sense its 195th human casualty.
In the end, what happened to the train in the hilly darkness along the line between Barra Funda station and its intended destination would remain a mystery.
It was 11:00 P.M. when the plain gray van pulled onto the roadside embankment a quarter of a kilometer west of where the railway track took a sharp bend along the steeply descending valley wall. The driver immediately cut the ignition and headlamps, then sat behind the wheel studying the rail bed. Although the night was moonless and starless, its darkness untinctured by village lights here in the sparsely populated hill country east of Taubate, he could see the signal post up the tracks through the lenses of his NVGs.
He briefly lowered his goggles and turned toward the rear of the van to give the order. A pair of men dressed in black, balaclava masks over their faces, emerged from the vehicle's side door. They untied the fastening cords of the tarpaulin that bedecked its roof, then pulled the tarp to the ground to expose a twelve-inch-diameter dish antenna mounted atop the van.
They folded and stowed the tarp, climbed back inside, and made some final calibrations. The dish rotated ninety degrees to the east and spotted on the automatic railway signal. Behind them in the van's cargo area, a small mobile generator hummed faintly in the dead quiet.
Facing front, the driver put the NVGs up to his eyes again and glanced to his left, westward, the direction from which the train would come rolling down the hillside. Then he shifted his attention to the signal post. When the moment came, the dish would bathe it with a wideband pulse lasting several hundred nanoseconds--less time than it took to blink--then turn on its axis and emit another short, pulsed beam as the train entered its line of sight. According to the Russian, Ilkanovitch, that was all that would be required.
What was the clever little message he had asked the Albanian to deliver with the rest of the material?
A test and a taste.
Soon Kuhl would see for himself whether either was to his pleasure.
At five before midnight he heard the rumble of the train in the distance. While he knew the open acoustics of the valley would make the train sound closer than it actually was, Kuhl's teeth came together with an eager click. It would appear within minutes, chugging along at close to seventy miles an hour on the straight downhill gradient.
He watched the signal, which was now displaying a yellow "slow" aspect.
The clank and rumble of the train grew louder.
Closer.
Kuhl watched the signal. He thought he perceived a rise in the generator's hum, a crackle in the air around him, but doubted it was anything more than his gaining anticipation.
The first pulse was initiated.
Kuhl watched.
The yellow light fluttered off, on, off. Then stayed off.
A breath hissed through his teeth. His jaw muscles tight, he whipped his head to the left and saw the approaching locomotive's lights splash across the ties. Then it nosed into sight below him, the figure of the engineer visible through the windows of its raised cab, a long, streamlined set of passenger cars hugging the slope behind it.
The dish rotated silently on the roof of the van and released its second pulse.
She was tall, tan, young, lovely, and from Ipanema, just like the girl in the old song. Christina from Ipanema, could you believe even her name rhymed with the title?
Darvin had met her in a bar at Barra Funda station, where he had stopped for a martini while waiting for his train. He'd been sitting there sipping from his glass, thinking about the big-money deal he'd clinched for his company in New York--well, his father-in-law's company, if you wanted to nitpick--when she came walking along, just like in the song, strutting right past the bar in this light, scoop-backed, flowery cotton shift--dia--mond earrings, black pearl necklace, chic mehndi lotus tattoo on her bare shoulder, her hips swaying to the rhythmic Afro-samba music blasting from the P.A. system, her hands loade
d with shopping bags from the expensive boutiques downtown. Christina from Ipanema.
Darvin had scarcely been able to believe it when he'd found himself leaning off his stool to ask her if she wanted to join him for a drink, first because he was a married man--it had been six months since he'd tied the knot, not at all coincidentally the same length of time he'd been employed as a salesman for Rinas International Hotel Supplies--and second because he hadn't had a pot to piss in before that, when he'd been hawking costume jewelry door-to-door at thirty bucks a ring and thirty-five a necklace for some Israeli gonif who had his office on 10th Avenue, getting a ten-percent commission on each piece of soon-to-discolor crap he unloaded, his assigned route running from 125th Street in Harlem to Washington Heights--try to earn a living wage that way, bro.
Back then, before he got hitched, before his wife's father consequently became his boss and handed him the company's plum Brazilian accounts, Darvin wouldn't have had the cash or confidence to so much as dream of picking up a woman in Christina's league, which was kind of funny if you thought about it, like something you'd expect to read in Penthouse Forum. Maybe he ought to send in an article, use one of those dumb pen names to protect his identity: Marrying to Score Babes, by Lucky Strike.
At this very moment, in fact, streaking through the inky South American night toward Rio and Darvin's room at the Ritz Carlton, snuggled close together in the dimly lit coach of the express train--the fifth of six cars coupled to the locomotive--they were engaged in an activity that would itself make for a great opening teaser. Ten minutes earlier they had asked the attendant for an afghan and thrown it over their laps, not because either of them was cold, but because Christina from Ipanema, who had herself been waiting for the train after an afternoon shopping spree in Sao Paulo with a girlfriend--or so she said--had put her mouth to his ear and whispered a suggestion or two about how they might while away the long hours of the ride, provided they could keep from being noticed by prying eyes.
This being a luxury line, they'd already had a nice amount of privacy. Their high-backed, buttery leather chairs blocked the view of them from behind. The wall-to-wall carpeting muted most of the sounds around them and, more importantly, most sounds they might make. The fluorescent lights over the central aisle had been switched off for the benefit of passengers wanting to catch some shuteye, and many of those who weren't asleep were in the buffet car having cocktails and canapes. Small incandescent lamps with rose-colored shades mounted between the windows gave off a subdued glow that was enough to read by, or whatever, and was also kind of romantic. The afghan, therefore, had niftily finalized yet another major deal for Darvin, giving them all the added cover they'd needed.
Now Darvin looked over at her and gasped. She looked back at him, her lips curling upward, and produced a soft, furry moan. Their faces were almost touching, their breaths mingling in moist little puffs. Their hands roved beneath the blanket like a couple of warm, burrowing animals, hers delving industriously into his unzipped and unbelted pants, his digging deep under the hem of her dress.
Darvin was about to reach the unquestionable high point of his journey--or this leg of it, at any rate--when the fluorescents running over the middle aisle abruptly flickered on, flooding the train with their stark radiance. Startled from her rapture, Christina from Ipanema straightened beside him, her hand becoming frustratingly still under the afghan, then slipping all the way out of his pants. She looked around in distracted confusion. Most of the dozing riders had been awakened by the sudden surge of light and were doing the same. Though Darvin remained dug in under her dress, figuring he'd stay there until explicitly asked to leave, he likewise found himself glancing about the coach. It wasn't just that the lights were on. It was that they were buzzing loudly and seemed much too bright, as if their wattage had been turned up to a hot, glaring level. And the attendant, who was staring up at the ceiling of the car, looked as bewildered as everyone else.
"O que e isto?" a guy behind him asked loudly in Portuguese. "Tudo bem?"
What is this? Is everything okay?
Seconds later, the speeding train jolted on the track and the emergency horn in the locomotive burst into clamorous, ear-splitting sound, making it clear that everything was very definitely not okay.
Minutes after that, Darvin, the woman who called herself Christina, and twenty-five other passengers aboard the car were dead.
When they were young and struggling to meet the rent in the Baltimore rowhouse apartment where they'd raised their four children, Al and Mary Montelione had played a silly little game with each other virtually every time they went to the supermarket. It had started soon after their next-to-youngest, Sofia, was born. Because they'd been living exclusively off his modest postman's salary and had needed to cut comers wherever possible, they would very carefully compare prices on grocery items, household supplies, really anything and everything they purchased.
One Fourth of July weekend during a particularly lean spell, they'd decided to treat the family to some ice cream, but standing at the dairy freezer, had suddenly realized they could scarcely afford even that meager indulgence, given that they'd had not a cent in the bank and about ten dollars cash between them to stretch over the holiday. Seeing the crestfallen look on Al's face as he'd read the price labels, Mary had grabbed him by the elbow and exclaimed: "Come on, mister, go for it! Whoever finds the cheapest quart wins a free trip to Rio!" It was one of those situations when you either had to laugh or cry, and her mock announcer's voice had pushed Al's precarious emotional balance toward the former. Cracking up hysterically, he'd plunged into the freezer as if he actually had been a contestant on a game show, all at once a whole lot less depressed than he'd been a moment before--which, of course, had been Mary's intent. Though she'd outscrounged him by twenty-two cents that evening, they had bought the ice cream for the family and he'd come home feeling like a winner for a change. From then on, the "trip to Rio" bit had become a standard tactic they'd used to relieve the strain of their constant financial woes. After a while even the kids had gotten in on it.
Four decades later, living simply but quite comfortably on Al's postal supervisor's retirement pension--things had gone well for them after his promotion, except for a health scare three years earlier, when he'd developed a severe cardiac arrhythmia that required normalization with an artificial pacemaker--Al and Mary were celebrating their Golden Anniversary with a real trip to Rio as well as other sight-seeing locales in Brazil, the travel and hotel reservations fully paid for by their now grown and married children, who had cooked up the idea as a surprise gift. Thus far the vacation had been spectacular. They'd spent five days in Copacabana, taken an air shuttle to Brasilia for a tour of the country's western region that included a breathtaking hot-air balloon ride over a wildlife preserve in the Pantanal, then flown back east, making a two-day stopover in Sao Paulo before boarding the night coach back to Rio, where they planned to spend the final weekend of their vacation.
After sampling the buffet in the dining car about three hours into the ride, they had taken their seats in the middle of the train, Mary pulling a Danielle Steele novel out of her travel bag, Al settling in for a snooze beside her, when the fluorescent overheads flashed on and started buzzing like a nest of wasps.
Quizzically scrunching her eyebrows, Mary looked up from her paperback, then turned to her husband.
Her expression at once became frightened.
Al had awakened with a start and had both hands on his chest his face pale, his mouth wide open and pulling in shallow snatches of air.
"Al what is it?" she said, her book dropping from her fingers as she reached over and took hold of his shoulder. "Al, honey, Al, are you sick?"
He nodded, too short of breath to answer.
Terrified now, oblivious to the murmurs that had arisen throughout the car over the lights going on, Mary frantically looked around for an attendant.
"We need a doctor over here!" she cried. "Please, someone help us!"
&nb
sp; But no one responded. A sudden, violent jolting of the train, followed by the loud blare of the emergency horn, had thrown the other occupants of the car into their own constricted spheres of panic. Mary heard cries of alarm all around her. Heard metal wheels grind over the tracks as the train's jarring, bumping, swaying movement worsened, threatening to fling her off of her seat.
Beside her, Al was gagging, his hands still clutching his chest directly over the spot where the pacemaker was implanted. Acting on impulse, not knowing what else to do, she threw herself protectively over him, put her arms around him, and held him to her.
It was in this position that their bloody, broken bodies were found the next day when the search teams recovered them from the wreckage.
In the second car of the train, Enzio Favas was proudly showing off his UpLink Telecommunications pager/ wristwatch to Alyssa, one of the Australian runway models he'd hired to showcase his upcoming beachwear line at the fashion designers' convention in Rio the following week.
"It send and receive E-mail, do you know? E-mail!" He pointed to the bottom of the readout display. "You touch screen and words appear right here!"
Alyssa glanced over at him. She'd been studying an unsightly calcium deposit under her fingernail and wishing there were a manicurist aboard.
"Uh-huh," she said.
"And it adjust to different time zone! Automateeek!" he enthused in thickly accented English. "Fly from New York City to Los Angeles, Paris to Tokyo, time never off by a minute! It all done by satellite, do you know?"
"Uh-huh." A little girl giggled several rows back and Alyssa frowned. "You think those brats behind us are ever going to shut up and go to sleep?"
Enzio shrugged. The "brats" were actually three very adorable sisters who were being shepherded cross-country by their nanny. Enzio had chatted briefly with the woman earlier in the ride and gotten the entire story: Parents divorced, mother living in Sao Paulo, father in Rio, joint custody arrangement, the poor babies constantly bouncing between them like Ping-Pong balls. Enzio, himself the product of a broken home, sympathized. How could Alyssa be so icy? So vain and self-absorbed? And besides that, how could she not have any interest in his watch?
